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Nina Bourne Is Dead at 93; Catapulted Sales of ‘Catch-22’

Nina Bourne, a publishing executive whose unfussy advertisements, peppered with understated but punchy copy, helped propel Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22,” Kay Thompson’s “Eloise” books and Robert Caro’s Robert Moses biography “The Power Broker” to the top of the best-seller lists, died on Friday at her home in Manhattan. She was 93.

Her death was confirmed by the editor Robert Gottlieb, a longtime colleague and friend. She also had a home in Sagaponack, N.Y.

Ms. Bourne, fresh out of Radcliffe, gained entree into book publishing by writing a letter of application to Simon & Schuster in the form of a poem that presented her qualifications while weaving in the names of the company’s top writers and book titles.

Initially employed as a secretary to Richard Simon, one of the company’s two founders, she demonstrated a flair for writing advertising copy under the tutelage of the legendary Jack Goodman, whose restrained, even self-deprecatory, style influenced her deeply. On the side she wrote light verse, which The New Yorker published from time to time.

As part of a triumvirate whose two other members were Mr. Gottlieb and Anthony Schulte, an associate editor, she designed print advertisements and book jackets and mapped out promotional campaigns for a long roster of blockbuster titles. Besides “The Power Broker,” “Catch-22” and the “Eloise” books, they included the Robert Crichton novel “The Secret of Santa Vittoria,” Chaim Potok’s novel “The Chosen” and Jessica Mitford’s exposé of the funeral industry, “The American Way of Death.”

In 1968 all three were wooed to Alfred A. Knopf, where Ms. Bourne was vice president for advertising until last year. She established the company’s signature style: large, clean, heavily bordered ads in black and white, with minimal copy used to create maximum impact.

“She was the genius of book-publishing ads and acknowledged as such,” Mr. Gottlieb said in a telephone interview Monday. “She was also a great publisher who read manuscripts, made editorial notes and devoted all her energy to telling the world how much we loved the book.”

Nina Bourne was born in Warsaw on June 16, 1916. When she was 5, her family moved to New York, where she attended the Fieldston School. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Radcliffe in 1937.

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Nina Bourne, in 1966.

At Simon & Schuster, she quickly became a prime mover in the marketing of books. After Mr. Goodman’s death in 1957 she took over writing “In the Inner Sanctum,” a newsy advertisement that read like a column and appeared in Publishers Weekly and The New York Times Book Review. She was named vice president for advertising in 1966.

The campaign she created for “Catch-22” is now regarded as a classic. Ms. Bourne was the most passionate in-house champion of the book, a darkly comic tale of World War II by a first-time novelist. Pleading for an increase in the initial print run, she turned to her colleagues during a production meeting, tears in her eyes, and asked, “If I can’t get this, why am I here?”

The novel needed help. Initial reviews in the United States were mixed. Ms. Bourne responded with an idiosyncratic campaign that treated the book as though it were already a phenomenon. She placed large advertisements that reported on its progress in the marketplace. She listed the names of eminent writers joining the growing chorus of praise and quoted unsolicited letters of praise from ordinary readers.

“Catch-22” sold about 35,000 copies in hardback — a good but not spectacular showing. But the groundswell was already under way. When the book hit the top of the best-seller lists in Britain, Ms. Bourne started lifting quotations from the British reviews in her ads.

She also chided American readers with a print ad with the headline “Come on! Don’t let the English beat us!” In the first year of its release as a Dell paperback, the novel sold more than a million copies. It has never been out of print since.

Ms. Bourne did fail to extract a blurb from Evelyn Waugh, who wrote to her: “I am sorry that the book fascinates you so much. It has many passages quite unsuitable to a lady’s reading.”

Simon & Schuster entered a period of turmoil after the death of Mr. Simon. Random House, aware that the triumvirate was restive under the new regime, lured all three to Knopf, where Alfred A. Knopf’s retirement had left a leadership gap. By then Ms. Bourne had become renowned in the industry for her ability to evoke the character of a book in a print ad or on a jacket with a few well-chosen words that avoided promotional cliché.

“She knew how to convey the enchantment of a book,” said Alice Quinn, her assistant at Knopf and later the poetry editor of The New Yorker and the executive director of the Poetry Society of America. “She created a narrative in an ad, and she’d often boldface certain adjectives or phrases so that even if you just glanced at it quickly, you caught the essential character and tone.”

Hundreds of books followed in the next four decades, including Robert Caro’s multivolume biography of Lyndon B. Johnson, Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon” and, as at Simon & Schuster, under-the-radar books like Steven Millhauser’s novel “Edwin Mullhouse.”

A version of this article appears in print on April 14, 2010, on page A24 of the New York edition with the headline: Nina Bourne Is Dead at 93; Catapulted Sales of ‘Catch-22’. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe